“I’ll swim with you,” said the girl. “I’m the best swimmer in my school. I won the house cup last year.”
Giuseppino did not know what this meant, but he agreed to follow the girl into the water a little way. “Maybe if you take my hand it’ll help,” he tried, but the girl only laughed and flipped over in the shallows, giving them a glimpse of her skinny, inadequately covered backside. She surfaced again, streaming seawater. “Let’s go to the tunnel,” said Sergio, seizing the girl by the arm.
“No,” said Giuseppino. “Wait. I’m not properly in yet.”
“Come on,” Sergio told the girl. “If you can swim well enough, I’ll show you a tunnel.”
The tunnel, a natural archway in the rock, was dark and full of underwater shadows. Through this archway fish with blue and yellow stripes and staring silver eyes drifted on the currents, grazing on the rock’s slimy underside. If you dived, it was possible to plunge through the arch and come up on the other side. Sergio knew full well that Giuseppino was frightened of the place. He swam ahead with the girl beside him, letting his brother splash and trip after them through the shallows, crying, “Wait! Wait!”
“Come into the water,” Sergio goaded. “Swim, Giuseppino. Don’t splatter about on the edge.”
They reached the pool, at whose center Sergio trod water. “Wait for me!” called Giuseppino.
Already they were getting away from him. Giuseppino lowered himself into the water, curling his stomach in, and let go of the rocks. With a great ungainly splashing he descended and gained a purchase on the edge with one toe. Sergio, with a toss of his hair, dived and vanished, coming up on the other side of the tunnel, from which his voice penetrated echoingly, like it was floating up from the crypt of the church. “Come through!” he called to the girl. “There’s a great big shoal of fish here!”
The girl dived. Her bare feet splashed and labored on the surface for a moment, then she, too, was gone.
Giuseppino balanced on his rock, alone now, listening to their shouting on the other side. He observed how the scirocco left a dusty film on the water, how the sky was becoming overcast and the waves were pounding a little stronger, so that his toes struggled for purchase. “Come on!” called Sergio’s strangely echoing voice on the other side of the tunnel. “Come through, Giuseppino!”
A big wave buffeted Giuseppino; curling back off the rocks called Morte delle Barche, it hit him with a hard slap. The water was cold here in the shade, deeper than he had first expected. Giuseppino did not want to swim through the tunnel; he did not want to go near it. It made strange sucking and slapping sounds. Sea anemones like red jellies pulsed on the dark underside of the archway. He was tugged close enough to touch and drew back again in terror: It was icy, like the walls of the freezer in the House at the Edge of Night. The water here was endowed with a powerful undertow. His father had almost drowned in this ocean, years ago.
But he could hear his brother splashing on the other side, the girl’s English laughter. “Swim through!” Sergio yelled. “Swim through! You can almost touch the bottom here!”
“Sergio!” Giuseppino called. “Come back!”
“Swim through! The sea’s calmer on this side, I promise.”
Another big wave. The girl’s high laugh. When Giuseppino put out his feet for the rock again he could not feel it. His feet kicked at nothing, dizzily, and he was slipping out and down, into the pool where he came up against the tunnel roof with a smack. He gulped water, sinking, scrabbling to get through the arch in the rock—yes, he would make it through the tunnel now!—he would show them!—and up again the sea brought him, grating his back against the barnacles, and down again, and under, and he was shouting and crying and gulping, flailing against the cold sea, and where was his brother? The sea had changed: It had become a fierce thing, the thing he had always feared it was at heart.
Sergio grabbed him around the waist and hauled him, pushing his head out of the water so that he heaved and honked and spluttered. “Swim,” Sergio was grunting, dragging him back toward the shore. “Swim, damn you. If you hadn’t panicked you would have made it.”
Sergio hauled him out of the water and up across the sand and stood over him, black over the sun, hands on hips. “Why didn’t you try properly?”
Giuseppino heaved and coughed. When at last he could speak, he said: “You left me. You didn’t help me at all.”
“It’s not my fault you’re ten years old and can’t swim.”
Giuseppino began, falteringly, to cry. He could swim. Hadn’t he swum? Lungs burning from his ordeal, eyes hot with tears, he glared at Sergio and at the English girl who was hopping from foot to foot, embarrassed to be caught in the crossfire of their enmity. “You left me,” he accused. “I heard you splashing and shouting on the other side. You didn’t care what happened to me.”
All at once they became aware of a chugging, and now a shout made them both turn. The fisherman ’Ncilino was out there beyond the rock; he had cut his motor and was bobbing up and down on the sluggish waves, his face wearing a startled, naked look without his sunglasses. “Boys!” he called. “Is this girl called Pamela?”
The girl nodded. “Her parents want her back. You two Espositos are going to be in trouble—the whole island’s looking for her.”
“Look what you did!” cried Sergio. “I was taking good care of her, but you delayed us with your splashing and your crying and now we’ll both be in trouble.”
Sanding himself off with the gritty towel their mother had sent, hauling his bike up by the handlebars, Giuseppino turned and began to run barefoot toward the road, shedding sand and water. Driving his bike ahead of him, sobbing, he climbed the hill to the town, Sergio following close behind, a little abashed at his brother’s grief.
When they reached the bar, Giuseppino buried his head in their mother’s waist, and naturally Sergio got the blame of it. And though Robert listened and listened to both sides of the tale, he felt he could no longer arbitrate between them, as though the boys had descended into some private battleground in which they must fight until one, at last, emerged the victor. “We should never have sent them to the ocean,” lamented Amedeo in private to his wife, that afternoon.
“There are some things that children must fight out alone,” said Pina, which only confirmed his worst fears about the matter.
—
THE TWO BOYS WERE sent that evening to make their confession to the priest. Grandmother Pina had always been adamant about the Sant’Agata festival, and she felt that a little Catholic fear might improve matters now. “Go and talk to Father Marco, like your grandmother says,” Maria-Grazia ordered. “And come back ready to get on with each other. Didn’t you agree at the beginning of the summer to be friends?”
Sullenly, both boys went to church. Father Ignazio was gone now: He had retired to his little house with the oleander bushes, replaced by a new and earnest man named Father Marco just out of the seminary. Father Ignazio’s eyes, always a little mischievous, had been a reassurance during the long and protracted confessions preceding the Sant’Agata festivals of other years. They had reassured you that no sin was unredeemable if only you were to confess it. The eyes of the young Father Marco were pious and impossibly sad. Even before you confessed your sins, he looked disappointed in you. When Sergio found himself on the other side of the grille, behind the little silk curtain, looking into the mournful eyes of Father Marco, sobs of guilt rose up in his throat. He blurted out a confused, choking confession: “And I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to kill him—only I was so angry at him that just for a moment I hoped, I actually hoped a little bit, that he would dro-o-own—”
Every widow of the Sant’Agata Committee was engaged in the ceremonial polishing of the saint’s statue at the back of the church, and the separating of sprigs of oleander for her starlike crown. Thus, every widow of the Sant’Agata Committee heard Sergio’s grief-stricken sobbing, and his long howl, and by nightfall it was known all over the island that Sergio Esposito h
ad tried to kill his brother.
Like the rumor about Uncle Flavio and Pierino, it was one from which Sergio was never fully to recover.
“Why don’t you both go to high school on the mainland?” suggested Maria-Grazia. “Bepe can take you across each morning on his ferry. There’s a whole big world out there, and Lord knows there’s space enough in it for both of you, if you can just bear each other’s company until then.”
Why, mourned Amedeo, must everybody always be encouraging them to leave?
—
AFTER THAT YEAR’S SANT’AGATA FESTIVAL, Giuseppino became quiet and secretive. He locked himself in his bedroom each afternoon, refusing even to play football with his friends Pietro and Calogero anymore, and studied with such ferocity it was as though he and the schoolbooks were engaged in a fight to the death. Sergio began to complain that his own books were going missing in those months, that Giuseppino was stealing them. But this was never proven, for the books were always found in their proper places when the house was searched. Giuseppino became so immersed in his studies that he emerged from his room only to eat and visit the bathroom, and even that he did reluctantly, rushing up and down the hall with a line between his eyebrows and a newly developed scholar’s hunch. At the end of the year he passed his exams so conclusively and astoundingly, exclaimed the new teacher, Professoressa Valente, that she recommended he be moved up a year. He was the cleverest boy she had ever taught.
When Giuseppino’s report was delivered to his parents, there were firecrackers on the veranda of the House at the Edge of Night. The tourists cheered and capered, believing it some local festival. Sergio stood at the edge of the party. For when had he ever been given such a celebration—when had firecrackers lit up the dark for him?
Thus, when the time came, Giuseppino went ahead of his elder brother to the mainland liceo, seated alone on the thwart of the Santa Maria del Mare, a neat parcel of books in his lap.
“I’ll go to university,” declared Giuseppino, to approving murmurs from his elders. “I see that it’s better to study hard now.”
“What about me?” raged Sergio to his mother. “I wanted to go to university, but Giuseppino’s got ahead of me now, on purpose, to stop me doing it. I know he has.”
“Well, can’t the two of you study?” asked Maria-Grazia. “Why does his studying stop you from studying?”
But Sergio, in some obscure way, still clearly felt that his destiny hung upon his brother’s. The two of them were separate now, Maria-Grazia saw; they had undergone some irreversible schism the summer of the almost-drowning, so that now they merely coexisted under the roof of the House at the Edge of Night, no longer really brothers. And now, too late, Sergio wanted Giuseppino back; now it was he who roamed about disconsolately with their slingshots and marbles, hoping Giuseppino would leave his books and join the games in the piazza, desperate for some friendly word.
“Did I do something wrong?” Maria-Grazia murmured in her husband’s ear the night after this disagreement. “Should I have been with them more as children? Was it a mistake to put so much of myself into the bar?”
But how could she have given them more? She had felt herself stretched thin as wire in the boys’ first years, torn between the demands of the business and the demands of her children until hardly a scrap remained of the girl who had once presided over the counter of the House at the Edge of Night, who had gone fearlessly about the island in pursuit of justice for Flavio, who had been the only island girl to win Robert Esposito’s heart.
“But what if I’d been the one in the bar?” reasoned her husband now. “What if I’d been the one putting aside the money in the cashbox to buy them new bicycles, saving to send them to university? And you’d been the one to care for them as babies? What then? What difference would it have made?”
“It would certainly have been more usual,” said Maria-Grazia, who had endured her share of scolding from the island’s widows, and the incomprehension of the fishermen who wondered why she stood at the counter while Robert wandered about the island with a baby carriage.
“Do you love them?” Robert asked her now, a little stern.
“Sì, caro. Of course.”
“Well, then.”
“You know what the widows say in the bar.”
“Oh, to hell with the widows in the bar!”
She laughed, and he seized her around the waist, as though they were still fresh lovers, as they had been during the war. “What they need,” said Robert, “is love. I didn’t have it, and I know that. Anything else is just incidental.”
And yet—though she never could have brought herself to articulate such a feeling out loud, or even in her own mind—she had never loved her sons as much as she had loved Robert. It had been her initial, guilty thought, on seeing the infant Sergio, that the suspicion she had held during her pregnancy was now confirmed: Yes, she loved her son, but no rush of affection had displaced Robert from his place of honor in her heart. Nothing had: no absence, no humiliation. Not her children’s births. As she watched the boys grow up, this secret had become blacker and more awful to her, a thing she felt certain her sons must sense, that was perhaps responsible for their constant warring, their dissatisfaction with everything. “It will all come right,” murmured Robert, as though he understood.
IV
Amedeo woke one morning in 1971 to find Pina turned away from him a little, one hand gripping the blanket. Ordinarily, her side of the bed would be abandoned before seven, her hobbling footsteps audible in another corner of the great house, moving about her early morning tasks. Now Amedeo touched her and found her cool. His cry woke the rest of the house. The others came running, and Maria-Grazia held before her mother’s face the spotted mirror from the bathroom shelf. The mirror remained clear.
All that day, the House at the Edge of Night was full of weeping. Amedeo wandered from room to room, his head bowed, his hands searching the walls, inconsolable. The death notices were put up, pasted with their black borders to every flat surface in the town, and mourners came to sit with Amedeo on the veranda. No one had been as loved on the island as Pina Vella.
The poet Mario Vazzo returned for the funeral; so did Professor Vincio and a handful of archaeologists, and those emigrants of Castellamare origin who remembered the schoolmistress from their humbler days: sons and daughters of the island who now wore loud foreign clothes and drove foreign cars. The church was so full that Father Marco was obliged to open both doors and shout the funeral Mass over the heads of the congregation to reach the crowd outside. Afterward, Pina was buried in a plot not far from Gesuina’s grave, and the islanders fought decorously for space to lay their particular flowers. The florist Gisella had been up all night winding funeral wreaths of trumpet vine and bougainvillea and blue plumbago, Pina’s favorites. Always, Pina had loved the native flowers of the island, for never in her life had she lived away from it.
That evening as the sun set, Maria-Grazia roamed alone about the island, limping in the uncomfortable shoes purchased from Valeria’s hardware store for the funeral, gathering more flowers. For, as decked as her mother’s grave was, it still did not seem enough to her. Maria-Grazia wandered until nightfall, allowing herself to weep, seeking greater and greater armfuls of plumbago and oleander. At eight o’clock, when she had piled the grave with a hundred boughs, she saw Robert coming to meet her across the fields. He stopped before her, and rubbed the tears from her face with his thumb. Bending, without speaking, he helped her arrange the boughs about Pina Vella’s grave until every one was used, a great canvas of island colors. “Is that enough?” asked Robert at last.
“Sì, amore,” said Maria-Grazia. “That’s enough.”
Now she composed herself a little, took a handkerchief from her pocket, and wiped the tears from her cheeks and the pollen from her hands. Robert put his arm about her, and together they returned to the bar to meet the crowd of mourners.
That night, Mario Vazzo sought out Amedeo, and sat beside him at the edge of t
he veranda. Amedeo clung to a bottle of arancello. The poet was to return to the mainland tomorrow. “I don’t know if I’ll come back here again,” said Mario Vazzo. “I’m getting old. But I wanted to be present today—for Pina—to honor her. A great woman, she was, a woman unlike any other I’ve met….” Mario Vazzo attempted a few more words about Pina, then fell into a contemplative silence, massaging his chin.
Amedeo anchored himself with both hands by the bottle of arancello. He had never said anything to Pina regarding his suspicions about the poet. Now he accosted Signor Vazzo instead, eyebrows bristling: “You loved my wife, didn’t you?”
The poet, elderly and stiff of motion, drew forward a little toward the doctor. He thought for a long time, watching the lights of a liner ply the horizon in search of some other, larger island, and eventually decided to remain silent.
This maddened Amedeo. Eyes puffed with weeping, gripping the bottle of arancello by the neck, he spoke at length about Pina—the grace of her, the strength—until the poor poet was reduced to tears. There had never been a better woman born on the island, persisted Amedeo. By Sant’Agata and Holy Gesù, how could she be gone? “And you loved her, too, Signor Vazzo,” he declared, some coldness in him making him repeat the accusation. “You’re weeping for her right now, and yet you won’t admit it. All that stuff in your poetry book about making love with an island woman in the caves by the sea. An island woman making love with Odisseo in the caves by the sea. An island of black water and many stars. You meant Pina, and that’s what you did with her, and you won’t do me the decency of admitting so.”
Mario Vazzo swept this accusation away with one fierce motion. Rising from the table, he left, and departed from the House at the Edge of Night, never to return.
Now Maria-Grazia, who had witnessed this altercation, sat down beside her father. “Mamma told me all about her friendship with Mario Vazzo,” she said. “They used to walk about the island. They sat on the cliff above the caves by the sea and read poetry. Nothing more than that. You have been an old fool, Papà, to brood on it all these years.”
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